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| - BattleTech is a wargaming and science fiction franchise, launched by FASA Corporation and currently owned by WizKids. The series began in 1984 with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech (originally named BattleDroids) and has since grown to include numerous expansions to the original game, several video games, a collectible card game, a series of science fiction novels, an animated television series and more.
- BattleTech is a wargaming and science fiction franchise launched by FASA Corporation in 1984, acquired by WizKids in 2000, and owned since 2003 by Topps. The series began with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech (originally named BattleDroids) by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock III and has since grown to include numerous expansions to the original game, several computer and video games, a collectible card game, a series of more than 100 novels, an animated television series and more.
- BattleTech began as a tabletop wargame, owned by FASA Corporation (but currently owned by WizKids). Beginning in 1984, BattleTech is most famous for the fielding and combat of battlemechs or colloquially known as 'mechs. These 'mechs are practically western equivalents of japanese mecha, although the 'mechs are more robotic, slow and ponderous, and function more like giant walking tanks. Since the launch of BattleTech, FASA spawned different series of tabletop wargaming concerning the BattleTech universe, such as CityTech (infantry combat), AeroTech (air combat), BattleSpace (spaceship battles) and MechWarrior (Tabletop RPG , where the players are represented by a character, much like a typical RPG). This page focuses on the specifications, explanations and technology found in the 'mechs f
- Humankind has set off into the galaxy, colonizing planets in a wide area radiating from the Earth, an area known as the Inner Sphere. With this work being more on the cynical side of the scale, the colonists were mostly “undesirables” thrown out of Earth. This, along with many other reasons, led to the almost non-stop wars of aggression and independence. During one of such wars, the Terran Hegemony created the Battlemechs, the hulking mechanical bipedal titans that would soon became the dominating force on the battlefields of the Inner Sphere.
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| abstract
| - BattleTech is a wargaming and science fiction franchise, launched by FASA Corporation and currently owned by WizKids. The series began in 1984 with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech (originally named BattleDroids) and has since grown to include numerous expansions to the original game, several video games, a collectible card game, a series of science fiction novels, an animated television series and more.
- BattleTech is a wargaming and science fiction franchise launched by FASA Corporation in 1984, acquired by WizKids in 2000, and owned since 2003 by Topps. The series began with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech (originally named BattleDroids) by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock III and has since grown to include numerous expansions to the original game, several computer and video games, a collectible card game, a series of more than 100 novels, an animated television series and more.
- BattleTech began as a tabletop wargame, owned by FASA Corporation (but currently owned by WizKids). Beginning in 1984, BattleTech is most famous for the fielding and combat of battlemechs or colloquially known as 'mechs. These 'mechs are practically western equivalents of japanese mecha, although the 'mechs are more robotic, slow and ponderous, and function more like giant walking tanks. Since the launch of BattleTech, FASA spawned different series of tabletop wargaming concerning the BattleTech universe, such as CityTech (infantry combat), AeroTech (air combat), BattleSpace (spaceship battles) and MechWarrior (Tabletop RPG , where the players are represented by a character, much like a typical RPG). This page focuses on the specifications, explanations and technology found in the 'mechs frequented in the BattleTech universe.
- Humankind has set off into the galaxy, colonizing planets in a wide area radiating from the Earth, an area known as the Inner Sphere. With this work being more on the cynical side of the scale, the colonists were mostly “undesirables” thrown out of Earth. This, along with many other reasons, led to the almost non-stop wars of aggression and independence. During one of such wars, the Terran Hegemony created the Battlemechs, the hulking mechanical bipedal titans that would soon became the dominating force on the battlefields of the Inner Sphere. Eventually, the Terran Hegemony, now reformed as the Star League, succeeded in unifying the whole region, and humanity entered the Golden Age, until an Evil Chancellor killed the ruler and took power for himself. The Star League Defense Force (SLDF) turned on the usurper and defeated him, only for the remaining noble families of the Star League to start fighting each other over the right to succeed to the throne. In disgust, general Aleksandr Kerensky of the SLDF took his whole army and departed into unknown space, leaving the nobles to fight out their differences in devastating wars. For three centuries, the five self proclaimed Successor States along with numerous minor powers fought for dominance, transforming the Inner Sphere into quasi-feudal society, while the Earth-based semi-religious organization known as ComStar, formed by the remains of Star League’s Department of Communications, observed this for their own agenda (Having a monopoly on the only means of interstellar communications helps). During these three centuries of total war, humankind lost a considerable amount of knowledge, now called Lostech, almost descending into dark ages. Only a discovery of the Star League Field Library Memory Core prevented that. The intensity of the conflict and the resulting technological regression had also caused a stalemate between the Successor States. This was only broken when Houses Steiner and Davion merged to form the Federated Commonwealth, which proceeded to nearly destroy House Liao in the Fourth Succession War, as well as seize a lot of territory from Houses Kurita and Marik. The newly formed House Steiner-Davion seemed poised to eventually conquer the Inner Sphere but in the year 3050 a new enemy appeared. After three centuries of exile, the descendants of the SLDF, now calling themselves "The Clans", launched a Blitzkrieg invasion of the Inner Sphere. Following the will of Aleksandr Kerensky, their intent was to end the still-ongoing Succession Wars by force. The two most prominent Clans of this invasion were Warden Clan Wolf, the direct successors of Kerensky bloodline who feel that the Crusader Clans were using Kerensky's will as an excuse to take over Inner Sphere and thus take part in the war to minimize damage, and the Crusader Clan Jade Falcon, who see the Inner Sphere as their rightful domain torn apart by fake usurpers. The invasion was eventually halted by using the Clans' own rules against them, honor binding them from attacking Inner Sphere for 15 years, but not before the Clans carved a huge chunk of territory out of the nearby Successor States, and for the next several decades both the Inner Sphere and the Clans will be busy dealing with the consequences. Within the Clans, the Crusaders led by Clan Jade Falcon were pointing at the Clan Wolf as a scapegoat, accusing their Khan, Ulric Kerensky, of a deliberate sabotage of the war effort, and were calling to break the 15 years truce and immediately restart the invasion. In return, Ulric initiated a Clan-scale Trial of Refusal in order to thwart Crusader ambitions, starting a war (which will be later known as the Refusal War) between the Wolves and the Falcons. The Wolves will lose the war with Ulric killed in action, but not before crippling the Falcon's might, effectively rendering all their invasion plans moot. Meanwhile in the Inner Sphere, the Clan threat convinced the previously stubborn leaders of the Five Successor States to form an alliance, and eventually create the Second Star League. In order to show the Clans that they mean business, they launched a large-scale military operation against the most aggressive and brutal of the Crusader clans, Clan Smoke Jaguar, retaking the former Combine territories and destroying the clan entirely. After this the Federated Commonwealth fractured and triggered a civil war that would ravage the two member Successor States. The conflict would also spill into the rest of the Inner Sphere and trigger more conflicts as the FedCom gains of the Fourth Succession War were gradually undone. When the fires finally died down the leaders of the Inner Sphere noticed that the Second Star League had effectively stood aside while its members mauled each other and the alliance was disbanded as a result. The idea of the Star League was effectively discarded as a foolish ideal by everyone. Everyone, except one group. The Word of Blake, a powerful and very Church Militant splinter faction of ComStar, started a Jihad to restore the Star League. Using manipulation and communication white-outs they fractured the Inner Sphere even further, arranging constant wars to weaken the States with the intent of conquering them piece by piece, effectively forcing them into the Star League at the gunpoint. As years went on the States sought through their plot, and the Blakists were forced to use the more open, brutal and later more desperate methods to achieve their goals. These methods, including indiscriminate use of WMDs, pissed off every other faction in the setting, including the Clans, and were nuked to oblivion in retaliation. While the Inner Sphere was busy dealing with the Word of Blake, the Clans had their own problems. The Homeworld-based Clans back in the Kerensky Cluster and Pentagon Worlds were engaged in political infighting fueled by the failure of invasion, resource shortages and the discussion of whatever the Clans that were living in Inner Sphere were even considered to be real Clans due to them being "tainted" by Inner Sphere's "dishonorable" ways of combat, which then after several proverbial sparks escalated into the full blown civil war that later will be known as The Wars of Reaving. It ended with the complete annihilation and absorption of several Clans, many bloodname gene vaults destroyed, the scientist caste purged and isolated the Homeworld Clans and the Inner Sphere Clans from each other. From the ashes of Jihad, a man named Devlin Stone, one of the key figures in defeating the Word of Blake, created the Republic of the Sphere with the capital in Terra. The Republic carved a big slice of all surrounding Successor States planets, many of them frequently contested border worlds. Stone's intent was to end the constant wars, and with the general exhaustion in the wake of Jihad that left no one who was interested in starting another large scale conflict, he succeeded. After all of that there might finally have been a possibility of peace, but you can't have a war game without war. So, someone blacked out the whole galactic communication grid. That left all the factions disconnected, without information, and suspicious of each other, eventually setting a lot of the conflicts going again. The BattleTech board game was launched in the early '80s, evolving from traditional tabletop wargaming like Dungeons and Dragons, but influenced by the relatively new genre of mecha anime rather than fantasy. At the most basic level, a BattleTech game featured two teams of four 'Mechs, each with their own unique arsenal of weaponry, defenses, and movement capabilities, which would proceed to beat each other into the ground across a terrain map. As the background fiction developed, scenarios were written to provide specific settings and rules to "recreate" the fictional battles of the 31st century, and expansions to the rules included conventional units, space combat, and large-scale warfare, bringing the game right back to its roots. In addition to the evolution of the original game, BattleTech has spawned numerous spin-off games, novels, computer games, and, in 1994, even an Animated Adaptation, one of the rare American-made (as opposed to Americanized) Humongous Mecha series. Among the most notable offshoots are Tabletop RPG rules, the Mechwarrior series of simulator-style Action Games, and the Mech Commander Real Time Strategy series. More details on all of these, particularly the novels and the animated series, are found under "BattleTech Expanded Universe." In 1996, FASA ran into a licensing problem that has since become famous. When the game was first created in 1984, eight of the core mecha were based on designs from such anime as Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Fang of the Sun Dougram (yes, the Marauder does resemble a Zentradi Officer's Battlepod). The Macross designs were made with the permission of Bandai, the original creators. However, due to complicated matters of international publication law, the US rights were actually owned by Harmony Gold, the company who used Macross to create Robotech. Harmony Gold finally took offense to the use of the designs, many of which had become iconic to BattleTech fans, and took the matter to court. By the time the dust cleared, FASA was still allowed to mention (and use) the disputed mecha in terms of game statistics, but could no longer show them in artwork. These 'mechs quickly became known as "The Unseen". A Sourcebook would later be written, with new designs to allow them to at least show the 'mechs again. FASA had also previously had a legal squabble with Lucasfilm over the original game title...Battle Droids. In 2009, Catalyst Game Labs was able to (somehow) get the rights to see the unseen once more.... or at least most of them. The designs that were not derived from Macross are fair game, but the iconic Warhammer, Marauder, Phoenix Hawk and nine others are still officially verboten.
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